Boxcars @StoryADayMay 12

Dedicated to my grandpa, who used to ride the rails during the Depression, and told me stories that inspired this StoryADayMay one.

Boxcars

by Marian Allen

Some guys were lucky; they got jobs. Joe wasn’t one of the lucky ones.

He scraped by on odd-jobs for a while, but the longer the Depression went on, the more guys were willing to work for less and less. Time came when Joe couldn’t live on what he could earn – not live like a regular person.

Time came when he wasn’t giving crackers and cheese to bums at the back door, he was following one to the hobo jungle by the rails.

Zeke took him under a wing. Some veterans of the road latched onto young guys and used them wrong, but Zeke was one of the good guys who just wanted to help out a fella who was down on his luck.

He showed Joe all the tricks: how to jimmy the door on a boxcar while a train was stopped for water or coal. He taught him how to make stew out of next to nothing in a tin can over a brush fire.

But hopping freights ages a man fast. In a year, Joe was wise to the ways of the rails and Zeke was failing.

Joe became one of those guys who’d do for four cents what another guy was doing for a nickle. He got pretty good at stealing from gardens and windowsills, and he split everything with Zeke.

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I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but now live in the woods in southern Indiana. Though I only write fiction, I love to read non-fiction. The more I learn about this world, the more fantastic I see it is.
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Welcome to my site!

I've been a writer since I could think, and a cook since I was in middle school. I'm also an inveterate this-and-thatter. So this blog, which is supposed to be professional, kind of isn't. I blog about anything I damn well please. Oh--and food. Don't forget the food.